Return to Ideology

IT was in 1960 that the end of ideology was announced in a book called The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties by Daniel Bell where the American writer argued that political ideas had lost their grip on people’s imagination and emotions.

- Chinki Sinha

Bold blueprints were no longer desired, he said. And with that, he pronounced the 1950s as the graveyard of ideologies. There was no commitment to a cause, no yearning for deep moral satisfaction. 

But the 1960s saw a return to liberalism and old-school capitalism as well as a return to moral values in the Western world politics. We have since then alternated between the endings and the beginnings in Western social sciences, which is also what framed our ideological debates in the early years of India’s independence. In binaries. Left and right. Liberalism and ‘ill-liberalism’. Socialism and capitalism. 

But we often forget the context. Of time and place. There was this transition then from traditional agrarian societies to modern industrial societies and for better or worse, much of that class conflict had been regulated in those societies. In ours, not so much. 

But then, there came the great disruption brought in by polarisation and ideology was rediscovered in the 1960s and another ending had begun. This is why it is important to look everywhere for endings and beginnings. West and East. Within and Without. 

India’s tryst with ideology has been more complicated than the West’s. We have caste and region, language and religion. All these are forces in their own right. In different times and different places within our country, one has trumped the other. 

In 1989, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) adopted Hindutva as its political ideology. Class politics was replaced by identity politics. Nationalism took over. Everything else was pushed aside. That’s how we experienced a shift. Economics gained centrality. Ideologies became diluted. Even diffused in some sense.